保护地球，探索宇宙，发现文明
Each December the Geminids meteor showers appear in the night sky. The 2021 showers are currently active until Dec. 17 and will peak on the night of Dec. 13 into the morning of Dec. 14, making those hours the best time for viewing the meteor shower. 每年12月，双子座流星雨都会出现在夜空中。2021年流星雨将持续到12月17日，并将在12月13日晚至14日上午达到高峰，因此这段时间是观赏流星雨的最佳时间。 The Geminids are caused by deb...
Snoopy, the Zero G Indicator for the Artemis I mission, was delivered to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Dec. 2, 2021, before being loaded into the Orion spacecraft ahead of launch early next year. Zero gravity indicators are small items carried aboard spacecraft that provide a visual indicator when a spacecraft has reached the weightlessness of microgravity....
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches with NASA’s Imaging X-ray Polarimetry Explorer, or IXPE, spacecraft onboard from Launch Complex 39A, Thursday, Dec. 9, 2021, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The IXPE spacecraft is the first satellite dedicated to measuring the polarization of X-rays from a variety of cosmic sources, such as black holes and neutron...
This stunning image captures a small region on the edge of the inky Coalsack Nebula, or Caldwell 99. Caldwell 99 is a dark nebula — a dense cloud of interstellar dust that completely blocks out visible wavelengths of light from objects behind it. The object at the center of the image is a (much smaller) protoplanetary nebula. The protoplanetary nebula phase ...
NASA’s Laser Communications Relay Demonstration, or LCRD, launched aboard a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program 3 mission from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Tuesday, Dec. 7, 2021, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA的激光通信中继演示，或LCRD，由联合发射联盟宇宙神Ⅴ型火箭发射，于2021年12月7日星期...
This image of our home planet shows how Earth looked from more than 950,000 miles, or 1.5 million kilometers, away during the total solar eclipse visible in Antarctica on Dec. 4, 2021. The EPIC instrument on the DSCOVR spacecraft captured the eclipse’s umbra, the dark, inner shadow of planet Earth. Shaped like a cone extending into space, it has a circ...
Christopher Kraft, flight director during Project Mercury, works at his console inside the Flight Control area at Mercury Mission Control during NASA’s first crewed missions in the 1960s. 克里斯托弗·卡夫是水星计划的飞行主管，在上世纪60年代NASA第一次载人任务期间，他在水星任务控制中心的飞行控制区内的控制台工作。 Kraft was a legend, who as NASA’s first flight director oversaw early human spaceflight missio...
NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover used its black-and-white navigation cameras to capture panoramas of this scene at two times of day. This was the view at 8:30 a.m. local Mars time on Nov. 16, 2021 (the 3,299th Martian day, or sol, of the mission) and again at 4:10 p.m. local Mars time. The two times of day provided contrasting lighting conditions that brought out...
Nebula [ neb-yuh-luh ]: star-forming cloud of gas and dust. Noun, plural neb·u·lae [neb-yuh-lee, -lahy] 星云:由气体和尘埃组成的恒星形成云。名词，复数neb·u·lae [neb-yuh-lee， -lahy] These four nebulae are known for their breathtaking beauty: the Eagle Nebula (which contains the Pillars of Creation), the Omega Nebula, the Trifid Nebula, and the Lagoon Nebula. In the 1950s, a team of...
As the Crew-2 mission departed the International Space Station aboard SpaceX Crew Dragon Endeavour, the crew snapped this image of the station during a flyaround of the orbiting lab that took place following undocking from the Harmony module’s space-facing port on Nov. 8, 2021. 2021年11月8日，当Crew-2任务机组成员搭乘SpaceX 载人龙飞船奋进号离开国际空间站时，机组人员在2021年11月8日从和谐号舱面向空间的端口脱离后绕...